Times, They Are a-Changing

Today was an emotionally draining day in one way, a heartwarming day in another way:

I went into the office to print out my resignation letter to my company, and to leave it with an HR colleague with whom I've been working for over a year, and who is helping me figure out which procedures to follow. When I'd put the signature on the first page, I told her that it felt very weird to end an era in my life that way — she said, yes, it was even weird for her and she hadn't been working alongside me nearly as many years as I've been with the company.

In the course of the day I met colleagues I hadn't seen in person in a while, we were happy to see each other, and I had a long conversation with a data science colleague.

In the evening, my US-based manager had scheduled a 'sync' meeting with my work team. The good news is that a colleague who switched away from our team is switching back again. I didn't know this before yesterday, and it was a great relief to have someone whom the team loves and trusts back again to support them — she looks happy with the change too!

But then I bluntly told the news that I was leaving the company. I went into detail about the extreme strain that leading a team in an ever-changing environment has put me under for the past few years, that the layoffs and company reorganization have made it significantly more stressful, and that I had reached an impasse to the point that I had decided in late January that staying was no longer possible.

My manager had emphasized before he scheduled the video call that my news would 'really devastate' the team. So I've been stewing in guilt that logically I know is undeserved, pretty much day and night. I was tremendously nervous about the call.

Since the call I've had a conversation with one teammate. The teammate I talked to told me that this was the most dramatic colleague news they'd had since early 2020, and that they realize now how much of the daily landscape I was without their realizing it, and how different it will become.

Brother Gi. reassured me that he's doing fine, although he was shocked (! he posted the relevant emojis, mostly for dramatic effect). This I had expected, and find reassuring.

The others are absorbing the information. I'd thought one or two might have expected this turn of events, but it turned out they didn't.

All of this is hard, and I've been moping. Conversations with the colleagues in other teams were also more subliminally awkward and sad because they often assumed we'd be having this or that interaction in a few weeks.

After I got home again, I listened to music, and more or less ended with "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"...

A Saturday: Clothes Sorting and Rain

Yesterday was a long day, so this morning I took my time about going outdoors. It was a grey, drizzly day, but aside from a few large drops, pleasant enough to walk in.

I walked to Tempelhof Airfield with pasta, lentils, etc., to donate to the transports to Ukraine. Along the way I checked in where donations had been gathered for shipping to Turkey after the earthquake there. Aside from a rain-soaked, handwritten paper sign 'No more donations today' and the old printed poster listing everything needed for earthquake survivors, from bottled water to power banks, there was no sign of activity.

But the grounds of the former Tempelhof Airport have changed since the last time I was there. The parking lot where a Spendenbrücke Ukraine van used to stand, is now filled with white containers that are temporary homes for refugees — I counted 13 containers along one side.

Young men and women, and children, were streaming toward the hangar with a large sports gym. Quieter in March 2022, it was alive today with families, hollers, and the squeak of shoe soles on a floor; and personnel were standing by in fluorescent safety vests.

After dropping off the food donations in the wire bin outside, I registered myself as a volunteer per app and found a blue Ikea bag full of unsorted clothes.

The floor space has now split up between donations intended for Ukraine — clothing that is no longer being requested on their website, but also Christmas decorations, muffin tins, and other random items — and cardboard boxes intended for Syria and Turkey. But there was no one else there except for one woman who was pleased to see me, but also warned me that the place would close at 5 p.m.

So I sorted the clothes destined for Ukraine, but was also curious about the littler cardboard boxes that seemed to be individual supply kits for earthquake survivors. As there was no one there to tell me how to handle those, I left them alone.

1 or 2 clothing items would have needed another wash, I plucked off a few hairs and specks of fuzz, and I had to throw out three items: a hoodie that had a wrist cuff worn through to the inner layer, Adidas shorts where half the logo had faded off, and a fleecy white jacket that had black staining on a cuff and on a zipper seam that I couldn't get off even with the help of hand sanitizer.

The way home was not so great, as the rain drenched my skirt, my purse, and my socks.

But since then I've been relaxing, and all's well that ends well.

P.S.: In the interests of fairness after a recent blog post, I should state that sending material donations to Turkey has been heavily disputed. So it's possible more Germans showed their solidarity by giving money to large charities that are at work in the region.

Groundhog Day in the Berlin House of Deputies

It was election day in Berlin on Sunday. The last city election didn't run smoothly. (In part due to the concurrent Berlin Marathon, which led to ballot supplies going missing, being delivered to the wrong location, and so on and so forth.) As a result, a court overturned the results and ordered a repeat of the election. So 1 year and a few months after the last one, we toddled off again.

My mother and sister acted as volunteers at polling stations, while my two youngest brothers and I just went off to vote. Volunteers in fluorescent safety vests pointed us along to the right building, where we stepped into a large room with twice as many volunteers as voters. It was a quick procedure to show our voter invitation letter, receive the three folded paper ballots, sit down in a booth, read through the lists of parties and candidates, and put our 'x's beside the candidate of our choice. Then we presented our ID cards, were checked against the voter lists, and dropped our ballots into a box. It appears that a few voting locations had black garbage bins repurposed as ballot boxes just to make sure there was enough capacity, which seems like a disturbing metaphor; but our location had a proper box.

On the way home we walked to two ice cream shops that were closed, then to a third that was open. The brothers had orange-and-basil ice cream with a second scoop of vanilla, while I had caramel ice cream and stracciatella ice cream. It was gloomy late winter weather, but there was still something reviving about the gelato, and a cosy group of diners had gathered inside the intimate space of the gelateria enjoying the more seasonally appropriate food offerings.

Before we'd even left the building to vote, a neighbour had popped out of the other door on our landing, and remarked on the voter envelopes she saw clutched in our hands. She was a polling station volunteer in the centre-north part of the city, she told us before vanishing down the stairs and out the building, and her station was prodigiously overstaffed.

Altogether the election was planned so that little went wrong except that one head volunteer for a polling station overslept. (The elections evidently required being out and about before 7 a.m., so this was no great surprise.)

What actually went wrong from my lefty point of view was that the centre-right Christian Democratic Union won well over 25% of the vote, while the Greens and Social Democratic Party are at below 20% each.

As for my sister and mother, they came home for a 4-hour volunteering break before returning to count ballots until what must have been 9 p.m. or later. I hope they'll be able to catch up on their sleep!

After the Turkish-Syrian Earthquake, in Berlin

It's been two days since the 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey that also affected Syria. I was getting tired of the silence on one of our messaging channels at work. I knew that colleagues are also from the region (but, like our Ukrainian colleagues, might be fearful of seeming 'demanding' if they say anything on their side), and I live in a heavily Turkish neighbourhood and do want to support my neighbours. Also, while the Berlin evening news did report the earthquake with diligence and dignity, my That's Racist radar was pinging a bit because I was fairly convinced that Berliners' response to an earthquake in another country might be different.

So I posted a Guardian article about the earthquakes and asked if donations or appeals have been organized in Berlin as far as people know. A colleague replied with three addresses: one address is in a music school in Kreuzberg; another I've forgotten; and the third was at a co-working space in my neighbourhood. Two Syrian colleagues seemed relieved that the earthquake had been mentioned at last.

Anyway, I did genuinely want to know the answer to my question and wasn't trying to be stodgy.

After lunch I took an hour of my employer's monthly 4-hour volunteer time off budget, cycled off to buy two little packs of diapers, and brought those along with bars of soap, baby shampoo, and toothbrushes, to the donation collection point in my neighbourhood.

When I followed the many people coming to donate, entered a car lot, and walked through to an inner courtyard, I saw that there was a sea of donations and volunteers hidden amongst the buildings. Two tall vans were trying to nudge into the courtyard to receive or drive away donations, a young woman was taping up cardboard boxes that had been stuffed with donations, and blue Ikea tote bags and the cardboard boxes were everywhere. The donations were evidently mostly clothing and blankets and baby diapers.

It might not have been an earthquake across thousands of miles, but an apartment building fire here in Berlin, that had made many people homeless, that the donors here were responding to, based on the urgent, active atmosphere. I felt vicariously proud of the generous spirit that I'm afraid only the Turkish community seems to be showing.

The Berlin evening news has interviewed Berliners who are still waiting to hear from friends or family in Turkey, so I wondered if a few of the donors or volunteers were also trying to do something active to make their time of suspense pass faster.

I dropped off my things inside the building where there was another sea of donations, and left again, arriving back home just in time for a meeting.

The Middle Ages and Team Bonding

I'm lagging a bit at recording life, but for this story it's just as well, because my brother Gi. filled in a missing piece of the puzzle today.

*

Prelude

My team at work was (partly) agog to eat at a Middle-Ages themed restaurant here in Berlin. Dante Alighieri also wrote his Inferno during the Middle Ages, and I'm sure if I ever got around to reading it, several passages would reflect my experience of arranging a date on which many teammates could appear, reserving seats and making sure vegetarian options existed, and assembling the wad of cash required to cover the cost of the meal, which at over 60 Euros per person was expensive and tripped my inner 'excessive capitalism' alert.

During the day itself, one of my teammates who hadn't accepted the calendar invitation told me in passing that they were thinking of showing up too (which of course would have been nice, but I was inwardly aghast at how much perception diverged from the reality of carefully reporting # of diners in advance, etc.)...

Main Event

The restaurant itself glowed charmingly when we finally met in it, and I forgot and forgave the past months of tribulation. Large wood-framed windows almost out of an English countryside idyll, wooden chairs, long tables, candle lighting, and dark pottery dishes.

While I had feared an  onslaught of bacchanalian revelry and noise, in fact the only other people in the restaurant besides the waitress, the singer, and the cook, were two young German men at the other table. Three other groups had cancelled their attendance, a delegate from one of them having the decency to turn up in person to explain.

The waitress and singer were woebegone, but launched into the entertainment undeterred.

First we were asked to order drinks, but these were not part of the prix-fixe menu. I was at that point hoarding my cash like Smáug the dragon so that the team and I wouldn't need to 'dine and dash' later. So I sat like a fanatic teetotaler, not ordering any drinks, while the others (whom I'd warned about our budget) asked for Riesling wine, beer, whisky, and grog at their own expense.

The drinks menu further informed us that we were 'Weibsbilder' and 'Mannsbilder'; that the proper etiquette was to eat with our daggers or our fingers; and that rather than say 'Prost' or anything else when raising our drinking mugs in a toast, we had to say 'To health!'

First the waitress rubbed her hand over Gi.'s arm to see if he was cold; he was wearing a t-shirt and slender chino pants. (His winter wardrobe is legend within our team, part of our family, and parts of the company beyond our team.)

Then she gave us each a white napkin the size of a small tablecloth. She put it around Gi.'s neck personally, making me fear that our teammate's offer to 'switch seats if you feel like the waitress is harassing you,' had some justification. Either way, we were to tie these around our necks to shield our clothing from mishaps while using medieval dining utensils. While our Greek teammate achieved a classical flair, perhaps through atavistic skill, and looked like a lady legislator or philosopher, I felt like I'd reverted into overgrown babyhood and was already mentally burying the photographic evidence of my appearance.

The singer, in her green and red robe and long blonde Guinevere hairstyle, introduced us to the restaurant etiquette.

First she poured water from a pitcher over Gi.'s hands, to symbolically purify our fingers for the meal. (Our Greek teammate was one step ahead of her and had already placed a plastic hand sanitizer spray bottle on the tabletop for all of us to share.)

Then she designated one of the Germans at the other table as toastmaster. As such, he had to stand up periodically, raise a mug, and shout 'To health!' And we had to reply in chorus, 'To health!'

I was designated as food taster. I had to stand up and take a bite of each course before anyone else. Then the other diners had to loudly count to ten, presumably to see if I toppled over 'deceased.' Apparently, so Gi. told me later, the instructions to me had been to exclaim "Es mundet!" at the end. Which I never did, so the waitress always prompted me "Mundet es?" And I answered "Ja" every time, getting a little exhausted by the end of the meal (although now that Gi. has divulged the context, I understand why I was asked!). Yesterday or today my mother also used the word 'mundet' by coincidence, and I shrieked internally.

Then came the food, which tasted very good:

Mead, poured into a beige-and-grey cow's horn at each spot

Crusty grey bread, dipped in bacon drippings (omnivore) or quark (vegetarian)

Gammon (omnivore) or Roasted potato pancakes (vegetarian) with bell pepper stew

Cauliflower soup

The mead was far nicer than the bottled mead I'd had for my 18th century research, the one I said tasted of an industrial mix between cabbage, raw alcohol, and honey. It also did me a favour in my 21st century real-life existence. I'd been avoiding liquor for a few days because I'd found myself tempted to drink strong alcohol to calm myself down while working lately: The experience of drinking alcohol unexpectedly and not feeling any urge to drink more, seems to have cured both my impulses and my anxiety about becoming an alcoholic.

It was after the soup where the Greek teammate asked if she could go out for a cigarette. The waitress, who had been chain-smoking in between her tours of duty, wholeheartedly supported her undertaking. 'Go and "breathe"', she urged us, "All of you!"

One of our teammates found her reminiscent of a dominatrix, but the waitress just reminded me of my ballet teacher.

When we returned indoors, the musical entertainment resumed.

For the first sing-along, the singer chose "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?", which we all knew and sang successfully. (I internally lady-fainted at one or two of the cruder lyrics I hadn't heard before.) But the next few sing-alongs were less successful except at the table with the two German men, because we Anglophones barely knew them. (For example, "Alle, die mit uns auf Kaperfahrt fahren.") There was a call-and-response song with a Latin refrain to which we had to respond "Amen." I was evidently the first diner to figure out the response, because apparently my Catholic upbringing has unexpected practical applications. And for one song, one of the German men and one of our teammates wielded two tambourines as an accompaniment.

But the singer also sang solo. In one of the songs, each verse laid out a different method of how to murder or beat spouses who happen to have a snaggletooth, be overweight, or snore. It was intensely gruesome and I surmised inwardly that I will always remember this team event as our 'Surprise Domestic Violence Song' Event.

But one of our teammates was leaning on the back of the chair gazing at the singer, beaming pleasantly throughout. I was in awe at her sang-froid. ...

At the end of the song, she turned to us and said, "I didn't understand a word of that!" (But, she added later, even if she had understood the German vocabulary, she would have still been smiling, as she likes political incorrectness.)

Altogether we had to work hard for our supper.

If the toastmaster failed to stand, the waitress (who embraced her role as a sort of Lord of Misrule) would bark at him the ruder German equivalent of 'Up off your arse!' I was wondering uneasily about what my superiors would say about this much profanity at a work team event.

But our British teammate professed himself satisfied that the team had seen their leader (me) also being barked at once 'A*** auf!' and then standing there in my capacity as taste tester while the assembled diners "glared" at me and counted to ten.

The second half of the meal:

Duck legs (omnivore) or breaded cheese (vegetarian), round dumplings, red cabbage, mushroom sauce (vegetarian)

Quark with berry sauce and a half pancake

Altogether it turned out to be an epic team event. And although I inwardly perspired about a few aspects, I haven't had this much fun in a very long time.